Your genetic information will no longer be held in private if this recently introduced bill coined as Preserving Employee Wellness Program Act (H.R.1313) gets passed. If your place of employment has a workplace wellness program this would allow them to coerce you to submit your genetic information to them. Coercion that is implied here is that a steep financial penalty will be imposed if you don’t. The amount of this penalty could go as high as 30% of an employee’s total cost of health insurance. The American Society of Human Genetics calculated on the estimated total annual cost sourced from a major insurer of an employee’s insurance of $18,142 where the penalty incurred would be $5443! Other situations would be worse where under the Public Health Service Act it can go as high as 50%. If this bill gets enacted into law it would effectively repeal the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) privacy protections enacted into law in 2008 and would no longer keep genetic information private. ‘The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do not apply when genetic tests are part of a “workplace wellness” program’1. On Wednesday, March 8th, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce passed the bill according to STAT. All 22 Republicans voted in favor of the bill, while all 17 Democrats opposed and is now waiting for full passage of the House and then Senate. Now ask yourself if you are employed by a company that carries a workplace wellness program - Can you trust them to keep that information totally private if this were to pass? Get proactive and write to your Congress. Trust me, this type of genetic information could go well beyond the medical community. This bill must be stopped. Consider trying POPVOX where you can easily submit your views to your Federal and State level legislatures on all bills and stay fully informed on an ongoing basis. 1 https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/10/workplace-wellness-genetic-testing/ http://www.ashg.org/policy/pdf/HR1313_letter_030717.pdf http://resistancereport.com/politics/gop-bill-genetic/ https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1313/all-info/text
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